


Timestamps for Hikaru

by Maldoror_Chant



Series: Hikaru [2]
Category: One Piece
Genre: CP9 - Freeform, M/M, Murder and Mayhem, So morally compromised notion of justice, Timestamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:01:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26645668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maldoror_Chant/pseuds/Maldoror_Chant
Summary: Timestamps for Hikaru
Relationships: Kaku/Rob Lucci
Series: Hikaru [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1938607
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I... completely forgot to post these ^^;; Life be crazy, what can I say. Thanks for the comments for Hikaru! I have dug up the sequel and I soon want to finish it, though it is queued behind the next Outland arc (should be posting soon) and probably a SPN fic as well. After that, though... Hikaru is back! (I hope.) Peace out.

_Timestamp situated before the start of the Hikaru mission_

It was obvious from the moment they tried to implement it that this whole 'Hikaru' plan was a flop. Kaku was disappointed to see this chance of getting Skullbone slip away. Or rather, he was going to be disappointed as soon he got through feeling so bloody relieved. As a CP9 agent, his own likes or dislikes were irrelevant, but that hadn't stopped him from disliking this plan. He'd taken to keeping a silent list of all the ways this could blow up in their faces with various disastrous consequences that would make the Water 7 debacle look like a blue ribbon scheme in comparison; he'd reached number fifteen that morning, and had added two more by the time it was obvious that Jango did not have what it would take to make it happen anyway.

What a stupid oversight on their part. He and Lucci - and Kalifa, Blueno and the rest of CP9 - had concentrated on setting up a full-blown foolproof infiltration mission in record time; they'd not stopped to consider that the whole thing revolved around hypnosis, and that the fundamental axiom of mesmerism was that that strength of mind of the hypnotist should be greater than that of the subject. Lucci had willpower that could punch holes through steel and Jango had the willpower of milk curd. There really was no contest. 

But since Lucci hadn't pulled the plug on the plan yet, Kaku did his part without comment. It hadn't been discussed, yet it was obvious to both team members that Lucci would not be left alone with this Jango while possibly under the latter's influence, so Kaku was there, arms crossed as he lounged back against the wall behind Lucci's chair, idly tallying the minutes, and then the hour, as it became more and more evident that this was just not going to work. 

On the first attempt, Jango had somehow managed to hypnotize himself, saying 'Oh, hello, my name's Hikaru, how do you do-' before falling fast asleep mid-sentence. His wakeup call from the desk followed shortly; it lacked somewhat in the courtesy department. 

The second attempt faltered because Jango got nervous of the way Lucci was staring at him. 

Lucci toned down his aura and set his expression to dead neutral for the third attempt, which went on for eighteen minutes before Jango, shaking like a leaf, said he needed a glass of water, and possibly the bathroom p-please.

Kaku shifted, to shove away from the wall and get Jango a glass of water, or preferably a large bucket to drown him in-

Lucci glanced over his shoulder, an odd gesture; as if he needed to be absolutely sure Kaku was still there. Then he faced front again and closed his eyes.

Kaku stayed where he was, frowning. Looked like Lucci was going to pull out all the stops to make this work. Kaku knew his partner's dedication to the mission was something that had to be seen to be believed, but to go this far... 

Jango opened his mouth, puzzled. Kaku shushed him with a gesture halfway between peremptory and threatening. Jango shut up.

The silence was potent, it gathered like pools of ocean water slowly seeping into the room...

After five minutes, Lucci's eyes opened. They weren't quite focused. 

The basics of Rokushiki was absolute self-control, taking the user beyond pain, beyond his physical limits, beyond human abilities. It made for the absolute weapon, for a perfect defense. Lucci had used the willpower this entailed to leave himself wide open instead.

'Now', Kaku signaled curtly behind Lucci's back. Jango jumped and gave Kaku and Lucci an uncertain look. When Kaku gestured again, a little threateningly this time, Jango lifted his chakram. 

"Um, listen to my voice. When I say One Two Jango, you will fall asleep. When you wake up, you will remember that your name is Hikaru, that you're a shipwright, and that you've been in an accident."

Jango's voice droned on, slowly picking up in assurance and persuasive force, which meant that this time he thought it was working. Kaku caught himself hoping the Marine private was wrong. 

That voice, rhythmic, controlled, removed layers of Lucci like an animal being flayed. It took ten minutes to go over the various characteristics being suppressed, then another five to implant the seeds of a new personality, each important point being repeated several times. The amnesia angle felt hokey to Kaku, but it was the easiest way of setting up a background without spending hours elaborating a false history and personality that 'Hikaru' himself might question and punch holes into, and wouldn't that leave them in a pickle if he did...Tabula Rasa, the only way. It'd be up to Kaku to fill in the blanks with their prepared cover story, adapting it on the fly as required. Lucky him.

Jango's face was dripping with sweat, but he'd covered all the salient points, and hammered them in to boot. Then he told Lucci in elaborate detail of the dream 'Hikaru' would have every night which would reinforce the conditioning until he met Skullbone. 

"Now, you are going to fall deeply asleep, and you'll wake up in half an hour...One...Two...Jango!"

Kaku's heart thudded once, twice- knew it, it's not going to work, nothing's happening-

Lucci began to list to one side. 

Kaku caught him before he could fall from the chair. Lucci was dead weight in his arms - for a gut-twisting moment Kaku thought his partner was comatose, or truly dead, because normally Lucci looked just as menacing asleep as he did awake, and right now he looked- he looked- Kaku reminded himself that this wasn't 'normally'; not by a long shot. 

Oh boy. Here we go.

Jango had slumped back in his chair, limp with utter exhaustion. Kaku ignored him. The private would have until tomorrow to recover, then he'd do Kalifa, assuming 'Hikaru' was taking properly in Lucci's mind. Kaku lifted Lucci up in his arms and headed towards the next room.

The doctor was the real deal, so was the nurse, but they usually practiced on board a Marines Grand Line war galleon rather than in a small clinic. They cleared the way so Kaku could lay Lucci down on the hospital bed, and then they set about attaching the monitors and prepping the room and their 'patient' as they would for someone recovering from head trauma. 

Kaku let them work, and went to stand by the window. They were in a tiny village on a small island along the Grand Line. Too many pirate attacks and a round of typhoid fever had left it a ghost town. Now, every person he could see from the clinic's window, the shopkeeper sweeping his stoop, the mother and her two children, the sailor sauntering down the street, were Cipher Pol agents or their families. The whole village was a sham, a backdrop, there to fool just one person; the man lying in the bed, or rather, the man he would be when he woke up, when he would no longer be a CP9 agent and one of the orchestrators of this illusion. Kaku and Lucci - no, Hikaru, it was Hikaru from now on - would leave in a few days, and then the village would be a ghost town once more, and no rumor of odd occurrences or abnormal government activity would follow the pair as they carried the lie with them on the ocean liner to Turtle Bay.

I really don’t like this mission, Kaku thought, but then he put that away in the same place he put all his other feelings when the game was afoot. Focus on the mission. Emotions became tools to be deployed as part of his mask, the face that would fool everybody he would meet from now on, including what was left of his partner.

A flicker of surprise crossed the doctor's dour face as Kaku turned from the window and walked back towards the bed. She had noticed a change, though she might not be able to pin down what was different about the agent. It was everything; body language, facial expression, mental make-up, thought process, everything.

Kaku hovered over his brother with unveiled concern. Still not awake. Nearly three weeks since Hikaru had been struck by that beam during the bombardment. The skull fracture was mended, so were the cuts, yet he was still unconscious. Thank god the doctor had said she'd seen signs of improvement today; rapid progress that would indicate he might wake up any minute now. 

Kaku took the limp hand in his own and waited.


	2. Chapter 2

_Timestamp right after the Hikaru fic._

Lucci had a feeling he'd be carrying this mission around like baggage for a little while longer, but the last few hours of blood, sex and satiation had done wonders at putting it behind him. He felt relaxed, as close to content as he ever got, and was even able to register a smidgeon of pity for Hikaru who'd thought he knew what a good fuck was. Though now that Lucci thought back on it, he remembered the shipwright being a tad bit disappointed at times. Hikaru had eventually convinced himself he was expecting too much. Despicable doormat.

Lying across the bed, long legs stretched out so his feet touched the floor, Lucci lengthened his spine and tensed and relaxed each muscle of the lethal weapon that was his body. At full stretch he reached out and grabbed the kerosene lantern from its hook near the bed. One casual overhand hurled the lamp across the cabin to smash to smithereens against the furthest wall.

Kaku sat up abruptly as the glass shattered and liquid splashed across the desk, the logbooks and the maps. He must have been dozing off. He was justified in being a little lax in his vigilance; they were the only ones left alive within a two hundred yard radius, and Lucci had always been a very...demanding lover on the few occasions he let Kaku take him. 

"Oh, right," Kaku said a bit dazedly, watching the kerosene spread across the wooden floor, seeping into cracks. He absently rubbed at a red mark on his shoulder and glanced down at Lucci. "It's past time we were getting back anyway. If we don't show soon, the others will start looking for us." He scooped up his pants and grimaced as he pulled them past a bruise on his hip. Then he sat down again, ostensibly to pull on his boots, though Lucci suspected his partner was in fact a little cotton-legged after months of high-stress infiltration, weeks of worrying, days and sleepless nights of planning a three-man invasion, hours of brutal fighting and, of course, Lucci. 

Kaku stifled a yawn. "You should get dressed as well. Oh, your clothes aren't any good anymore, are they." Which was one way of putting it; the other being to admit that Lucci's shirt was a ripped and bloody mess and his pants were so stiff with splashes of gore they could probably stand on their own. "No problem, you've got your choice of clean clothes in-hmf!" 

His mouth and body were tense beneath Lucci's for the length of a heartbeat; he'd not appreciated getting grabbed and slammed back into the mattress like that. When he returned the vicious kiss, it was hard and on his own terms, as always. Kaku never gave an inch that Lucci didn't have to push for and that wasn't, for that reason, a negotiated truce. They'd been at this for years, and it had yet to get boring.

But as pleasant as this interlude was, it was indeed time to go. Lucci's focus shifted inward, and with barely a shiver of concentration, he slipped into his other skin.

"Fw-ack! Ugh! Lucci- I hate it when you do that!" Kaku sat up, wiping his mouth and making spluttering noises. 

Lucci didn't smirk because leopards are not capable of such an expression, but the indolent way he stretched out on the ripped and rumpled sheets made his point. Yes, he knew that getting a mouthful of fur drove his lover up the wall, which was precisely why he'd done it.

Kaku stared at him, arrested in the effort of picking what was probably psychosomatic hair off his tongue. "You're not serious. You're not going out like that, are you?"

Lucci idly sprung his claws in and out of their sheaths a few times, the way a man would play with his favorite dagger. Ahhhh, he'd missed this almost as much as bloodshed. 

"But why-...you don't have to do that. Here." Kaku got up and strode over to the sea-chest near the bed. He glanced encouragingly back over his shoulder as he opened it, to be met by a glacial golden glow in return. 

"What? What's wrong with them?" Kaku picked up a t-shirt - blue with a sailing ship painted on it - and waved it about pointedly. 

Near the headboard, a tail started to flick like a rattlesnake sounding its warning. 

"Look, they're _your clothes,_ why are you being so-..."

Lucci slowly blinked and twitched his ears back along his skull. Those were Hikaru's clothes. His teammate, who was normally the more perceptive of the two when it came to human sensibilities, was being remarkably dense today.

"It's cute the way you wave those cookie-shaped ears around, but I don't read leopard semaphore so I don’t know what you're trying to say," Kaku commented, though clearly he was lying since he'd let the lid of the sea-chest drop down with a thump. 

Lucci's tongue rasped around his jaw, smoothing fur and chasing down a blend of scent/tastes, his own and his lover's. After a moment of lazy contemplation, he decided not to retaliate for the term 'cookie-shaped'. He rolled over onto his back to writhe against what remained of the sheets, making the bed creak, then flipped back onto his forepaws.

Kaku sighed as he sat down once more and ran fingers through the fur at Lucci's neck. "You're a pain sometimes, you know that?"

Lucci huffed once, a warning, and Kaku removed his hand after one last pass. Hmf. The leopard hadn't cared much about words, but a gesture meant for pets and house cats would normally result in a bloodied arm. Luckily for his partner, he was feeling quite good right now. Sated. The cat forgot, and licked its paw; the part of his mind which was still fully Lucci wondered if Kaku might not have gotten a little too used to that milquetoast Hikaru, and would require a bit of...reeducation...Yes...A weeklong no-holds-barred sparring session - or until Kaku collapsed, whichever came first - would do their fallen Douriki levels a world of good. 

Kaku reached for his t-shirt and top. Since he was such a fastidious prig when it came to getting truly bloody, his clothes were reasonably clean despite the massacre in the citadel and on board The Claw. 

"This is all very well, and it might be marginally better than having you run around naked," he commented as he pulled the black cloth over his head, "but you're going to scare the troops." 

Cry me a river.

Although it was physiologically possible, as a Zoan, to speak in this form, Lucci never cared to. Neither did Kaku require it. "You're being pig-headed. How would you like it if _I_ transformed right here and now, huh?" 

Feel free. With such a low ceiling, it'll be entertaining to watch if nothing else. 

"Did I mention you're a pain?"

Yes, I believe you did. 

Lucci slipped bonelessly off the bed and landed in a collected package of sinew and muscle with barely more than a pad-pad on the wooden floor. He stared pointedly at the spilled kerosene, the smell of which was getting too aggressive for his sensitive nose, then took his departure on soft footsteps, leaving the honor of tossing the match to his partner. By now Lucci had cut all connections with this room and this ship; if he had Juro under his claws right now, he'd barely hurt him. The swift rip and tear would merely be tidying up a loose end. When it came to burning the pirate ship they'd helped patch up, Kaku would get more satisfaction out of it, and paws weren't made for matches.

A faint trace of smoke-smell followed him out to the deck, kerosene-soaked paper caught quickly. It did nothing to deaden the symphony of slaughter-scents that greeted him outside. Lucci licked his chops and sniffed until he could feel his mind grow red and fuzzy. 

"Done. Let's go." 

He followed his teammate to the railing and jumped gracefully to shore, where the blood-smells were fainter and mixed with gunpowder and brine. 

His head was a little clearer by the time they reached a group of humans running around like scattered rabbits. Despite the hustle and bustle, the weaklings in their white uniforms cleared a cautious path for the pair. Then the stares and whispers started, as well as the rapid exodus of the men from units associated with CP9 who knew exactly what, or rather who, this incongruous animal was; they'd have been warned in hushed voices by their commanding officers that Rob Lucci was particularly savage and indiscriminate in this form and best avoided. This situation called for a rapid strategic retreat to assess the situation, preferably from another island or better yet, another ocean altogether. 

Their less advised colleagues continued to ogle. One of them looked like he was about to ask Kaku a question as the latter passed. Lucci's padding steps slowed to see what the creature had to say and if it might be foolish and insubordinate enough to justify discipline in the form of a mauling.

"Lucci, heel," Kaku murmured without looking back.

Lucci did not need to see his partner's face to know what small daredevil grin was lurking beneath the peak of the cap. Kaku would know Lucci wouldn't do anything to him in front of the rank and file, and had apparently decided he could live with the consequences later.

So the leopard padded after his lover without any reaction, while inside, Lucci was smiling his own brand of smile and thinking, reeducation. Definitely.


End file.
